


The Right Things to Keep

by horchata



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Geralt's here in spirit (as he so often is), Oxenfurt Academy (The Witcher), Professor Jaskier | Dandelion, Soliloquy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:53:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27965612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horchata/pseuds/horchata
Summary: He takes a step, begins:“Picture something beautiful.”
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	The Right Things to Keep

Jaskier allows himself to look at the face of each musician. They are, all of them, nervous. He is, too. His fingers and feet feel restless. Teaching is like composing, and although the podium is well smoothed and worn from the grip and rub of centuries of wisened, worrying fingers, Jaskier cannot bring himself to linger.

He takes a step, begins: “Picture something beautiful.”

There’s silence for a moment. One among them closes his eyes to imagine better. Fondness rises in his torso and, oh, he loves them all already.

“Now,” Jaskier continues in a slow pace, “picture yourself a child alongside it. What does the child want, when they see a beautiful thing?”

“To put it in their mouth,” says one, an obvious older sister. Laughter bubbles through the room. Jaskier grins along and feels the mood settle pleasantly into joy, into calm. He smiles at them all, swirls his hand; _go on_.

“They… want to pick it up,” says another.

“To take it.”

“To _hold_ it,” she insists.

“Mm,” Jaskier hears himself say, and winces at the mistake. He’s given away the answer he was looking for too early. Ah, well. Nothing doing now.

“Yes, yes. And,” he continues, circling his steps, “they are corrected. _You_ were corrected. You were taught to look and not touch, to observe and not have. You were told what parts were yours and what must be left. To enjoy the flower is not to uproot the plant. Cut just enough. Just enough so that the stems be woven into braids, or placed in humble cups atop set tables.

“This continues as we grow. We learn how much can be ours, and when, and why not. The man grows to understand what may belong to him, however short that time may be. He wrests the gem from its bedrock, cuts and polishes, sets it into gold, and there it gleams; his, until his bones have withered. The nursemaid holds the infant until its teeth and station demand it wean. A child holds a moth until it’s held too tight and turns to dust.” His circuit closed, Jaskier finds himself back at the podium. He touches his open traveling journal, the leather worn, scratched. “There are limits to the ways we can hold the things we find beautiful.”

He centers himself at the stand and rubs his fingers in its grooves after all. He looks at the beautiful group and wants worlds for each and every one.

Jaskier speaks slowly in the way he heard his teachers speak to signal something special, the way he starts the turn in telling tales, the moral at the close.

“The poet,” he says. “Poets know all things are theirs forever. What’s set in verse belongs to the page and to the spirit, and once set in song is all the more eternal, especially a song that stays in the mind.”

A student hums in the first row: _1, 3, 5; 4, 3, 4, 5._

He laughs, it’s startled out of him. “Well met,” Jaskier smirks, sorrow blooming at the base of his throat. “Well met.”

He breathes against the freshness of the cut, and starts anew. “You are here perhaps just because you saw my insufferable name, or knew that insufferable song, or had free suppers and little sense, and all that you shall come to regret.” Some laugh, and so he continues. “But the rest of you! You are here to learn the way to compose a verse well, and in doing so keep any and all matter of things for eternity. We’ll study the songs our ancestors sang to our great-grandparents. We will study the songs of the drunks, and drink ourselves if we are lucky! We will learn the music of ritual, of ceremony. You have seen the standard syllabus, I have no need to recount it to you. What is different for you now that I’ve been pulled from my dusty path out in the Continent and you are here with me, is that we will also discuss the responsibility of the station you are studying in this course, the way history is changed with song: in the moment as it’s composed for those living through, and after for those who retell it.

“Be you a bard of a court, or a bard of the tavern, you’ll be asked or compelled—and a select few commissioned—to tell what happened and where and when and to whom. Your skill will determine if your song is remembered. You will determine its what, and its how. What you make is forever, until you compel it forgotten. The details yours, and thus what is trimmed forever lost. Your tale, told well, becomes a new truth.”

Some of them have started scribbling his phrases, some are still listening, skeptical, excited. They’re all still so quiet. Jaskier takes comfort in knowing that won’t last too long. Before they aren’t so spellbound by first days and speeches, he wants them to know what he didn’t, wants better for them than he had. Better than mountains and wishes.

“You are poet-historians here in this class. What you create may live forever.” He closes his traveling journal. “You must ask yourself, over and over: ‘What are the right things to keep?’”

**Author's Note:**

> This lived on tumblr for a long time, and I just wanted to put it here, too. [Come find me!](https://boppinrobin.tumblr.com) I am almost always thinking about The Mountain.


End file.
